Joshua Colt wrote:Good day Mark! Thanks for being available for questions.
We just moved onto a 20 acre homestead in SW Missouri. The property is about 5 acres of woodland and 15 acres of old pasture in various stages of succession surrounded on 3 sides by grown up hedge rows. I have a pretty wide variety of trees species growing naturally including various types of oak, ash, various hickory nut trees, pecans, cherry, persimmon, paw-paw, osage orange and of course eastern red cedar.
I'm working on removing the red cedar for posts and bed edging and only leaving a grove of them in the center of the property for a future "living barn" for future stock.
I'm looking to remove thick stands of mostly ash that are around 3 - 6" ABH for firewood and using those for firewood coppice. I'm also wanting to clear enough of an area to use as a willow coppice for my wife's basketry.
But one of my main objectives is to coppice the oak trees for use in mushroom production. There are a significant amount of oaks that are perfect size for mushroom logs right now 6-8" ABH. Many of them are growing in clusters of 3 to 8 is a small area, so I could thin most of them out and still leave one to grow up. From my understand oak regrows best from a stump less than 15", is this correct? If I have an area that I want to use mainly as coppice for mushrooms am I better off to take them all down to allow more light to reach the new growth? Any suggestion as to how high I should cut them from the ground?
Also do you have suggestions about good tree species to plant (or maybe something I already have) for use as tree hay for cattle, sheep and possibly horses?
I look forward to your reply and hope to be able to check out your book!
Best regards!
Hi Joshua
Congrats on the new homestead. Sounds like you've got some great resources available to you. Yup - your oaks ought to be a prime size for good resprouting. Because light is a key variable to stimulating vigorous sprouting, I'd tend to cut a patch all at once to open up as big a gap as you can. Otherwise, the new sprouts will likely be weak and spindly. If you've got nicely formed trees that you'd like to preserve for timber/mast down the line, ideally they'd be on the northern edge of these patches.
As far as height goes, leave 2-3" of stump. That should be plenty. The book gets into a lot of detail on this as well. Good luck! We grow a lot of shiitake here and I wish we had more oak.
Check the thread on tree hay for species recommendations. Also, there's a good bit on this in the book.